Sorry for the delay this week! With Brian in Seoul, me getting back from NYC and Ian in London it was difficult to all get together for our usual Friday recording sessions for the podcast. We managed to get this episode recorded on Monday, but I then had to run off to DC for another NDA event. We did finally manage to get things edited so today we have the delayed episode 6.

This week's podcast begins with our review impressions of the iPhone 5. We also go over the other major smartphone announcements from the past week: Motorola's Medfield powered RAZR i, HTC's Windows Phone 8X/8S and LG's Optimus G. Last week we talked about Haswell from a platform perspective and this week we talk about it more from a CPU performance perspective. Finally, Ian shared his thoughts on Borderlands 2 and playing the title with NVIDIA's Physx enabled.

Also, due to popular request, we have submitted our podcast for inclusion in the Zune Marketplace although we haven't seen approval yet. Show notes including time stamps are also on the to-do list but they didn't make it in this round.

38 Comments

Anand really needs to convince Brian to get a room. There's some serious latent man (boy)-crush happening through-out the podcasts!Anand's continued giggling & predilection towards anything & everything Brian says is frankly difficult to listen to. This kind of attention disregarding pervasively the otherguests/members of the podcast is surely not diplomatic & equitable - epsecially by someone in a role of leadership as Mr. Shimpi is.. being the CEO & boss of the 'website'/'business'.Reply

...I'd like to suggest a roundtable on the relatively new Smartphone OS environment. With the iPhone5 gorilla getting its annual walk up the tallest skyscrapers of the press corp, I'm very interested to hear opinions and impressions on where Google, Microsoft and Apple stand with their Windows 8 Phone, Jellybean and iOS6 situations.

Particularly with the lauded performance improvements encountered on iPhone5 hardware, I'd like to know where Android is with it's Project Butter and how Windows Phone 8 stacks up at stock. I have an HTC One X and while I agree the series doesn't get nearly as much love as it deserves (from a previous podcast), I'd much rather settle for updated timetables regarding Jellybean updates from HTC, Samsung and their ilk as well as if Project Butter will be included in those updates indicating Adreno 225 can handle it... or if we'll have to wait another eternity for another validation period.

This is of particular interest to me now that HTC has released Windows 8 Phone devices, as that suggests a possibility of split resources for OS improvements at HTC HQ.

I doubt you'll get any kind of accurate update timetable out of HTC or Samsung, although I believe the latter promised JB by end of year and update leaks have already been floating in the wild, so that's a good sign.

Frankly I'm not terribly concerned with Jelly Bean, the performance improvements and updated notifications are nice but it won't drastically change how I use my phone, my EVO LTE is already pretty damn snappy and if I get a hankering for JB I can just flash CM 10.

I'm much more curious about the future direction of the Nexus line and the rumors of an expanded manufacturer lineup.Reply

And also since the same port can be used for different outgoing connections, maybe when they shift to USB 3 the same port will be compatible, but you'd need yet another cable becauseof the new pins in USB 3. With 150MB/s smartphone memory chips coming out soon, we may want those sooner than expected. Reply

Most people seem to think that it will take a long time before we see fully compatible non authorized third party cables (if at all) due to the chip. I would think that third party cables in general would be more expensive.

Has anyone figured out what exactly the chip does? Hopefully the knock off folks can figure out how to get cables without the chip to at least charge the phone. Maybe it'll only work if you insert it a certain side up or something. I haven't owned an iPhone for a while, but having to purchase $20 cables so that I can charge a phone would stink.Reply